The article forwarded here, by Beeson, rejects fetal testing because, on her view, it sends the message that people devalue the lives of the disabled. iirc, her point was to reach abortion advocates to make them rethink their support for abortion on demand and their support for the very distinction you're talking about. Prenatal diagnosis, on Beeson's view, can only be a policy that is about devaluing the lives of the disabled.
"When we encourage placing many more prospective parents in the position of deciding which characteristics in a fetus are acceptable and which render it unworthy of being born, where are we really going? Wouldn't we be better off in the long run directing some of these vast resources into broader strategies for preventing disease and disability that are consistent with an ethic of caring, rather than following the chimera of human perfectibility?"
Now, how does that article and support of Beeson's opinion come off as not trying to impose anything on others. As Singer pointed out: it is not clear at all that parents who choose to abort are doing so because they devalue the lives of the disabled. It's the same kind of thinking i've seen opponents in the anti abortion movement use. When I tell them that I will happily call the fetus I abort an unborn child they are aghast. They cannot understand that it is not because I devalue life that I abort.
>You're assuming I regard light or trivial exercise of the
>freedom to get an abortion as evil.
no, i didn't say that did i? i said you regarded them as trivial. my point: you made a judgment. good, bad or indifferent, you make a distinction and so make a judgment. we all do.
Beeson is a policy wonk, she would like to influence health policy. She is trying to influence how we do things in the country. She sneaks her "totalitarianism" in thru the backdoor. while she recognizes that parents often aren't particularly interested in prenatal testing or even in acting on the results, nonetheless, she is worried that the medical establishment will just presto chango turn them into sheeple and they'll go along.
i am rejecting the way in which parents have been characterized in this forum -- repeatedly.
right.
And since Thomas Seay seemed to
>think all abortions were taken very seriously by all concerned,
Seay was saying that they weren't necessarily undertaken for trivial reasons.
e.g.: My decision not to get pregnant by using condoms is not trivial and i don't treat the matter of my fertility trivially. And yet, I do not agonize every time I buy a box or make my partner wear a condom.